Earning money (?) from travel photography on Alamy

I looked recently at what sort of financial return I typically get from shooting model released stock photos on Alamy.

Now for overseas travel in Europe. How does that pay?

Holiday 1 - ten days in Spain, touring.
Costs - on holiday with the family
Date - June 2004
Sales - 13
Income - Alamy gross $3,179 Me £871
Income per day per annum - £22

Holiday 2 - seven days in France, touring.
Costs - on holiday with the family
Date - June 2006
Sales - 2
Income - Alamy gross $84 Me £23
Income per day per annum - £1

Holiday 3 - two days in Paris.
Costs - weekend away with the wife
Date - Sept 2006
Sales - 1
Income - Alamy gross $114 Me £38
Income per day per annum - £9

'Holiday' 4 - one day in Rome.
Costs - a day trip; no overnight stay; rained all day; travel etc £50
Date - Jan 2006
Sales - 4
Income - Alamy gross $515 Me £170 - £50 = £120
Income per day per annum - £60

What is "Income per day per annum"? It's how much I have earned each year subsequently from a day spent shooting. Ignoring the processing time. I also ignore the first six months after the shoot when no cash comes in. It's conspicuous that even the best of these rates is less than the "Income per hour per annum" from many stock shoots featured in the separate model released shooting exercise.

'Holiday 4' was not really a holiday at all. It was a day trip to test the effectiveness of using low cost airlines to 'blitz' a destination. Perhaps the rain helped. Although it dramatically reduced the actual number of photos captured. It's worth mentioning that many of the images were captured as transparencies - the last time that I have done that. In the end, only 15 images went onto Alamy.

My usual approach - holidays 1 -3 - is that I don't go out of my way to get images. I'm on holiday. With the family. The photography does not really impinge on the holiday. But when I return, there is probably days of processing. And looking at the statistics, I should be far more critical of the time spent doing that processing, because it's not working out to be a remotely sensible way of spending my time.

Fundamentally there's a competition problem on Alamy when it comes to travel. Thousands of photographers putting photos online to sell from the same locations visited, most of which are too boring these days for the travel mags to chat about. At least in the way that most of us take those images. I've got to get myself into a different mindset to avoid taking the same photos as everyone else. But I clearly don't. I'm on holiday - I don't want to think too hard about photography.

In a way I'm sitting with the many hobby stock photographers whose travel stock photos form a huge proportion of what's on Alamy where money does not matter too much.

But for me, time spent processing on my return home for me means that I'm not earning money elsewhere. And I know all the more now after doing this exercise that putting my holiday photos up for sale (with the odd exception) is is a bad business decision.

I really don't think my statistics will be too different from other people's on Alamy. But that won't stop about 2000 more travel shots being uploaded tomorrow....

London by Thames Clipper

Monday was my wedding anniversary so I spent the day with my wife zipping up and down the River Thames on the excellent Thames Clipper service, so fast once downstream of Tower Bridge and at just the right pace to get photos of London on the upstream side.

Easy access to all the pics (including Shirley, my wife) on Flickr but otherwise the images have been added to photoconnect - unfortunately another cloudy day with a short sunny period towards the end.

South Bank

River Thames

Canary Wharf

Greenwich

Transport in London

Events in London

Dublin's fair city.....

.... is sometimes best appreciated indoors. Well a lot of the time if my experience is anything to go by!

I was booked by a client in July to get images of their School in the centre of Dublin. The trip was called off at Gatwick airport when a call to Dublin confirmed the BBC's forecast of solid rain all day. So at the start of August I made a second attempt, this time deciding to stay on an extra day to catch up with some friends and spend that extra day seeing more of town and getting some stock photos of Dublin.

The day of the client shoot was dull and rainy but there were at least some dry spells. The next day was solid rain from the go so it was off to that faithful standby the Guinness Brewery until some blue sky was spotted on the horizon. After eating I had about an hour of sunshine to whizz around Trinity College and get a bus to the airport from O'Connell Street. So probably not the best 'photo day' (I bet there are thousands of images of Dublin in the rain) but it was a damn good pint of Guinness.....

I have put a few shots from the shoot in my portfolio on flickr.

Notting Hill Carnival - London 2008

I spent a few hours today at the Notting Hill Carnival - now officially the London Carnival - by the time I was getting into the groove I had to go. I've loaded several images up to Alamy (where they are guaranteed to miss the press deadlines even though Alamy are now on a 24 hour QC period. I'll load a few to Photoshelter later as 'breaking news' so they may be available in the USA before the UK. Except of course they are available on Photoconnect now!

Notting Hill Carnival 2008

The landscape route to Wales

It was not that the M4 motorway was blocked but I thought I'd take a more leisurly route to give me an opportunity to get in some shooting. So I've added some photos from along the A4 including Hungerford, Marlborough, the Kennet and Avon Canal, and Wiltshire landscapes including one of those chalk White Horses and the famous neolithic Silbury Hill.

Jilted on my date with Naomi

I was writing earlier in the week about heading to Terminal 5 to get some photos yesterday - sure enough I was there yesterday afternoon; what I did not mention (because I keep these things to myself) is that I was meeting up with Naomi Campbell to take a few pics and discuss how I could help further her career if I could take a few pics of her doing lifestyle chores around my house. You know, hoovering, ironing, dusting.....

Anyway, while I was there, handbags happened.

So I had to make do with taking pics of the terminal. Which I can't load to this post because Blogger is being temperamental. So I put them on Photoconnect.

Heathrow Terminal 5 stock photos

Sorry, no photos of Naomi.

Passport photos - who needs them?

On the first day when I make LightTouchImages.co.uk the referral point for my Adwords advertising I get a request to do quick passport like (but smiling) shots for a firm in the City. Co-incidentally the government has decided today that a passport may well get you out of having a UK ID card and all this reminds me that I have not yet registered to get tickets for Glastonbury.

The Glastonbury connection? Well each and every person who would like a ticket has to register - here - (explained here) and to register you have to upload a passport-like photo. Registration does not get you a ticket but gets you into a draw to win the opportunity to buy a ticket - which if you win you do not have to take up if you don't want to. If you win and choose to go, you can take up to three other people - but they have to be registered too, but do not have to have won. The whole scheme is pretty well thought out as a way of stopping ticket touts.

I intend to take the harmless step of registering - even if I lose I might just find someone I know who wins, and if I win I will then have about three weeks trying to find up to three people who have registered and want a spare 'ticket'.

Once registered, win or lose, this "Passport to Glasto" lasts 5 years giving me the opportunity to win and get there one day. Of course I'll take the camera - I am sure I will get something rather more interesting than the current crop of Glastonbury photos on photoconnect. I quite fancy taking lifestyle pics of stoned not so trendy not so young things updating their blogs wirelessly from a tent in a godforsaken swamp in the West Country. Me, I'll have the VW camper (thank you).

But first I have to do some Glastonbury passport photos. I hate passport photo assignments.

Focus on Imaging at Birmingham NEC

So today was the annual trip to Brum to check out whether the ratio of beards worn by photographers still is three times the national average - and yes it is!

Aside from this vital observation I trotted around getting lost several times, always somehow finishing up at the Nikon stand (is someone trying to tell me comething?).

Mulling about in my brain is the issue of where to go with the mainstay of my equipment - the DSLR. Already possessing a Pentax K10D and a Canon EOS5D it may seem strange to be considering scrapping the lot and buying a Nikon D300 (I must write more on this soon) but at least I was using the show to help me make big decisions (OK, I normally just go to take candids of the models....)
Just what was going on with all those laptops anyway?

My day was interrupted by a surprise call from a friend who works in big deals at a big city bank calling to let me know that Getty Images had just been bought by a Private Equity group. Who knows what this means but perhaps a good time to get my images in before Getty reinvents itself ("I submitted to Getty in the good old days before they accepted images from riff raff with any old camera"). After all I bought the EOS5D to fit in with them and I will be heartily pissed off if new owners open things up to the likes of me (before I owned the EOS5D, that is).

Back to the Nikon stand where a couple of guys were explaining to a couple of hundred people about the wonders of wireless TTL flash. Strangely it was pitched as if this was something Nikon had just discovered and that the audience had never heard of. Strange to a Pentax user anyway whose cameras have had this technology for 10 years now but whose marketing team have felt it appropriate to keep it all very quiet....

I'm rambling now.